The appearance of orderliness in the pages of the Register and the abstract, highly distilled information it provides give it a simplicity that is its greatest flaw. And yet there are hints that beneath the Freshman Register's tranquil, even complacent surface lies a conception of Harvard that is neither simple nor static. It is possible to spend hours staring at tiny representations of people one knows--representations that already belong to the past, photographs, concentrations, sometimes even names hopelessly out of date. What blasted hopes are hinted at by the obsolete ambitions expressed here to major in such fields as Law, Natural Sciences or Comparative Literature? One senior will soon acquire her seventh Register, completing a set that includes in its scope everyone who attended Harvard during her four-year tenure, and conclusively giving the lie to the common view that the Register conveys no sense of Harvard as flux and continuity.
Of necessity, however, this collection of photographs lacks the depth and the linguistic intrigue of Rules Relating and, even more so, Courses of Instruction. The latter presents an ambitious, systematic cross-section of all human experience. "The Meaning of Life" (Philosophy 10) is no longer to be found here, but there are still entries on such indispensable aspects of life as food ("Human Nutrition"), language ("Language"), the weather ("The Atmosphere, the Oceans and World Views It"), and accounting ("Financial Accounting"). And these commonplaces are only the beginning--this volume holds the key to the foreign and the arcane as well: covering spaces, manifolds, simplicial and CW complexes, Gibbs states, fibre bundles, spectral sequences, saturated structures, and totally transcendental theories, all within the space of a few pages.
Courses of Instruction, like the world it portrays, changes little from year to year, but in one respect the 1975-1976 edition embodies a near-revolutionary change. Professors and lecturers alike are listed by name only, Oscar Handlin (Pforzheimer University Professor) taking his place beside Orest M. Subtelny (Lecturer on History) without the distinction of his title. This move towards egalitarianism in the faculty has been loudly deplored by a number of senior professors who worked hard for tenure, and may be reconsidered in time for next year's edition.
COURSES OF INSTRUCTION depicts a world safely ruled by reason. a world where knowledge and order prevail over the alien and the unknowable. The most trivial-seeming remarks in this catalogue suggest the existence of a firm underlying logic. A note appended to a course in art history--"Enrollment: Limited to 390"--must be either unthinkably arbitrary, or the visible part of a much larger, perfectly rational order.
Even the language of this book, like that of Rules Relating, is most rational when it seems most unreal. A course entitled "Sound and Light: Mass Telecommunications as an Avenue to Civilized Society" has this note following its description:
Sections develop case studies by adducing firsthand evidence and primary source research.
This sort of lengthy euphemism--twelve words where the more mundane "sections watch television" would do as well--is characteristic of Courses of Instruction. And, no less so, of Rules Relating. Both volumes are filled with prohibitions that "ordinarily" apply--"ordinarily" meaning that the prohibition is customarily waived for those willing to endure a bit of red tape.
The world of these volumes is both sane and sinister in the tradition of Kafka. Rules Relating offers this scenario:
Any student who becomes ill during an examination should report the illness to the proctor. The proctor will have the student escorted to the University Health Services, where the student will be kept incommunicado until able to resume the examination for the remainder of the examination time to which he is entitled.
It is a world of knowledge and uncertainty. These books are published to explain, by parts, Harvard College--to cast light where otherwise there would be darkness. But, like the Old Testament, their light is fragmentary and uneven, ambiguous and problematic; and like all literature, they help create the shadowy world they describe.